Going the distance.

• Author: Perlmutt, David
• Position: NC TREND: Commuting-life

WHAT DO TOM ROSS, A FREELANCE VIDEOGRAPHER, A CLINTON FOUNDATION STAFFER AND A REAL-ESTATE EXECUTIVE HAVE IN COMMON? THEY'RE ALL SUPER-COMMUTERS.

Excuse Tom Ross if he's rousted from a sound sleep and temporarily loses track of his coordinates. Ross, the former North Carolina judge and college and university system president, is living in two worlds.

Most Mondays before sunrise, he pulls himself from bed in Charlotte to make the 8:06 a.m. flight to New York's LaGuardia Airport. After leading the 17-campus UNC System and a stint as Duke University's first Terry Sanford Distinguished Fellow (he's still in that role), Ross has presided over the New York-based Volcker Alliance for the last year. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker launched the nonpartisan organization in 2013 to explore ways to build public trust in government.

At 66, Ross is among hundreds of North Carolina bankers, lawyers, consultants, researchers, company executives and others who leave the state most workweeks by plane, train or car then return at week's end. Whether you call them road warriors or "super-commuters," the label coined by a transportation think tank at New York University, their journey is vastly longer than the U.S. Census Bureau's mega-commuters, workers who travel at least 90 minutes and 50 miles to their jobs.

Ross, like many super-commuters, had personal reasons for choosing to make the weekly trek to his office in midtown Manhattan instead of moving there. He and his wife, Susan, grandparents of four, wanted to be close to their daughter and her family in Charlotte. The Rosses moved there last year after the Republican-dominated UNC Board of Governors controversially removed Ross, a Democrat, as UNC System president and later hired Margaret Spellings, a former U.S. education secretary under President George W. Bush. Ross says he and Susan never considered leaving North Carolina, where he grew up in Greensboro and, until now, has spent his career. "I deeply care about the state and eventually will retire there. I didn't want to give up my residency," Ross says. "The frequency of direct flights from Charlotte to New York made the choice easy."

Super-commuting spiked during the Great Recession, when larger cities had high-paying jobs and a splintered housing market made it difficult to sell homes. Even now, with housing values on the rise again in cities like Charlotte and Raleigh, many super-commuters still are unwilling to uproot their families...